Fresh details of last year’s boardroom struggle at Barclays over chief executive Bob Diamond’s 2011 bonus emerged yesterday, after the former chairman of its pay committee said she was alone in calling for him to receive a “zero” reward.

Alison Carnwath, the former head of Barclays’ remuneration committee, told the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards that the British bank had demanded “too much patience from their shareholders and were insufficiently sensitive to the political and economic environment and the hostile attitude to banks generally”.

She said: “All of that suggested to me [Bob Diamond] should have been willing to accept a zero bonus for that year.”

In April last year, the board “unanimously” recommended that Diamond receive a £2.7m bonus for 2011. The awarding of the bonus became extremely contentious in the so-called Shareholder Spring, with almost 27% of Barclays shareholders voting against the bank's 2011 remuneration report. Carnwath became a figurehead for shareholder unrest with almost 21% of investors voting against her reelection at the group's annual meeting. In July, she resigned from the Barclays board.

Marcus Agius, the former chairman of Barclays who later resigned in the wake of the Libor scandal last year, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph to have said last year that all remuneration decisions “were unanimously supported” by each of the non-executive directors. However, Carnwath said yesterday there was a board meeting where she was not able to attend, where "The chairman was extremely fair in putting forward my point of view, though nevertheless my point of view did not prevail”.

Carnwath said that she had opposed the award when discussions surrounding it first took place in January and February of last year.

She said that she was “amazed” at Agius’s recommendation when he had recommended the award of Diamond’s bonus. She said. “I thought it was the wrong recommendation.”

She added: “I think it’s fair to say that some people were sympathetic towards my point of view but generally tended to go with the chairman, so that’s how matters were left.”

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Carnwath added that “a lot of people felt that Diamond, quote ‘needed to have this bonus’”. She said: “[They felt] that it was important to him, that he was a vital part and that he needed recognition in this sort of way.”

Sir John Sunderland, who is now chairman of Barclays remuneration committee and had been a non-executive director at the time of Diamond's bonus award, agreed at a later hearing of the Banking Standards Commission yesterday that there had been a "vigorous exchange of views and different ideas" over pay.

He said: “Everyone except Ms Carnwath supported the decision to award a bonus to Mr Diamond” but later said that Carnworth "in the end was part of that unanimous decision".

Sunderland declined to accept that it had been a mistake to pay the former chief executive a bonus for 2011.Asked by commission chairman Andrew Tyrie whether he felt it had been a "profound mistake" to award Diamond a bonus, Sunderland said: "No I do not."

He added: “With hindsight; would it have been better if it had been less, possibly; by what quantum, difficult to say.”

"I did not say then and I will not say now that he should not have received a bonus. I would not have recommend a nil bonus for Mr Diamond."

Carnwath, in her earlier hearing, said she believed Diamond "thought he found loyalty in people around him by paying them very well; in my view more than he needed to".

She said that pay in the banking industry had reached "obscene levels" in some instances. She added: "Over years in financial services, a sense of entitlement has emerged among many [to be paid large bonuses]."

John Thornton, chairman of the remuneration committee at HSBC, also appeared at the Banking Commission hearing alongside Sunderland. He told the panel that he was paid $1.5m for 3.5 days a week per year working for HSBC as a non-executive director and chairman of its remuneration committee.

Tyrie asked whether this made it difficult in setting other peoples pay. He said: "You're setting the remuneration of others, those people know how much you are paid. Do you think that influences the way they view your decisions?"